Studio Liverpool axed?
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
It could be that combined with Sony's continuing financial troubles they are trying to slim down their investment in internal game developement. If that's the case then there might be more internal studios given the axe over the next year or two.
It's both expensive and risky to develope titles internally. If a title succeeds you have a greater potential for a profit. However, if it doesn't succeed, you have a far larger loss. That is in comparison to letting an external studio take all of the risks.
Not saying this is what is happening, of course. Just that it's one of the possibilities. Especially with Sony's top management being in relative flux and seemingly constant corporate realignment/reorganization the past few years.
Regards,
SB
There may be some internal politics we don't know about but come on now, Sony has an eye for concepts and has no problem spending money on it.
Four words: Survival of the fittest
Obviously as a business you have to know what works. So there's a baseline and you try to develop original concepts but at the same time, keeping an eye out for market trends. Even Heavy Rain as a concept has proven to work before, it has market appeal. Turning then adventure game, Uncharted, into a shooter is part of that process. They could have made ND churn out more jak or UC but they didn't. So you adapt. Still, proof evidence enough for me. Keeping an eye out for the business but at the same time creating something original from old concepts, a process Studio Liverpool hasn't learned so they are closing.
Yeah.
Sony loosing market share this generation has probably affected the viability of their internal studios seriously.
During the PS1 and PS2 days, when an intenral studio made a good game, they basically had 90% market share, and a huge portion of that was going to listen to the hype and buy that game. These games benefited by the fact that they were available exclusively on the top most popular console with a difference and the platform was benefited for having even more exclusive games which helped selling future internally developed games even more. Healthy sales were guaranteed, it was easier to break even multimilion projects and profit margins were probably better than selling third party games.
Now with Sony having less than 50% market share, spending on expensive projects is a riskier investment.
Motorstorm, Resistence (I know that wasnt a first party title), Wipeout, Killzone etc would have been much bigger successes and much more recognized if the PS3 was as successful as the PS2, the studios would have been financially healthier and probably less projects would have been canceled.
The original Killzone on PS2 for example was a total mess in many areas. Ugly reviews and super buggy but managed to break even and even become a platinum since the PS2 had probably 90 million userbase at the time and the title had some pretty good coverage by the media and promoted by Sony
Sony made these studios to have a strong portfolio of exclusive games and secure their market share with high quality exclusive titles. But with a shrunk market share this generation, having so many studios internally owned are probably non sustainable especially with the rising development costs and only one platform to sell your games on
if you have around 60 million users globally so late into the game, you are competing with hight quality third party games and you create internally a shitload of titles, how many gamers are going to spend on your games with their finite budget to make most of your projects very successful?
I believe Sony's evaluation took into consideration this when they closed down some studios and canceled some projects
Probably these studios should start considering making games on non-Playstation platforms too. Tablets, phones or PC, I dont know. Thinking about it I was quite surprised some Psygnosis IP's made it to competing platforms (Saturn and N64) like Destruction Derby and Wipeout. How did that work?
I have checked the games these studios made in Wikipedia and were/are pretty talented.
Sony studios were in a position to experiment more with original IPs and ideas and thats what I liked with the Playstation brand. They really tried with the PS3. but things are getting riskier and riskier.
This timely Studio Cambridge artist blog sheds some light:
Now we know internally Sony's studios have to pitch their games to Sony same as freelancers pitching to a publisher, and it's down to the suits to choose what gets backed and what doesn't.
Do you care to reevaluate your position now?
Prophecy2k
Veteran
Isn't that basically what ERP said earlier?
That was the impression I got from him anyway.
Eitherway it sounds pretty silly to me... As ultimately for Sony, you have a 50-100 person staff in a UK studio not doing anything significant for the past five years because you don't want to agree to any of their pitched ideas. Yet you still have to pay the salaries of all those 50-100 people... Surely it would have been better for them to be working on something significant for that time period, and then just see what comes of it?
It seems even more now that the talent at Liverpool was just being wasted.
That was the impression I got from him anyway.
Eitherway it sounds pretty silly to me... As ultimately for Sony, you have a 50-100 person staff in a UK studio not doing anything significant for the past five years because you don't want to agree to any of their pitched ideas. Yet you still have to pay the salaries of all those 50-100 people... Surely it would have been better for them to be working on something significant for that time period, and then just see what comes of it?
It seems even more now that the talent at Liverpool was just being wasted.
This timely Studio Cambridge artist blog sheds some light:
Now we know internally Sony's studios have to pitch their games to Sony same as freelancers pitching to a publisher, and it's down to the suits to choose what gets backed and what doesn't.
Do you care to reevaluate your position now?
Oh boy here we go with the smarty snide comments again. This is why quote mining....you ignored the whole other part of my point which puts into perspective. Pitching a concept that's expensive and has no market appeal will get you nowhere fast. No matter how far ahead of the curve they think they are. Here's an idea I know you haven't thought of: maybe, just maybe they don't have the pedigree of a ND to execute on their ideas. Did you ever think of that? Nobody would close up a studio that's brimming with talent and ideas, that doesn't happen. Heck, they still haven't closed the Last Guardian studio and that game has been in development hell for years.
Maybe, just maybe Naughty Dog is better than the whole of those studios in the UK. Maybe, just maybe, as a studio they are less like Sony's Santa Monica studios and more like Team Ico in which expensive ideas become more expensive not having the talent and skill to execute on concepts. Who wants more of those around? Seriously, the writing is on the wall anybody can see it. So, I'm not buying it (yes I believe that overall, these are all talentless studios that will be getting Darwin's treatment and the few that are talented will find work in other studios or start their own) and neither is Sony. I suspect more of these Sony studios just like them to close down, they are poorly managed and can't sustain themselves. You can't ignore the business side of game development. /The end
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Yes. I actually said, "Can't say for sure, but I wouldn't say it's obviously Studio Liverpool's fault as you say." The difference is I don't know and am entertaining the various options, asking for reasons to believe one way or another, whereas you are outright certain that Studio Liverpool lacked the creative talent to achieve more and you place the blame firmly on them and not at all on the financial executives who have the final say on what they got to make.
Ultimately, and very importantly, whatever internal designs Liverpool came up with that we don't know about, didn't have to meet with market approval to get the green light, but had to meet with executive approval. Ask anyone in the creative industries how hard and unfair that is, and you'll get plenty of feedback about how great ideas (sometimes proven great later when someone finally gives them backing) get turned away. The lack of creative output does not signify a lack of creative input in the cases where financial executives ultimately have the final say.
I know very well how creatives work and how one gets funding. I know first hand that everything and everyone who seeks external funding needs to meet the expectation of market trends, that's why an executive job exists in the first place. What world do you live in that, that isn't a rule? There are very few exceptions maybe the guys who made the original MW can walk into any Publisher and get funding for their game without suits getting in the way, I can't really think of anybody else. Maybe you need to recalibrate what it means to work in a creative industry.
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With that experience, would you say that funding executives are typically understanding of novel ideas, good at understanding artistic vision, and good at understanding what the market wants to ensure they back only the most fiscally viable projects?
No, not all executives know what are good ideas and simply fund what are good ideas no matter what the cost or what the markets want. In Sony's case, their executives at least in their worldwide studio's game division have a proven track record. The list is quite long, It's why they are letting Last Guardian remain in development hell and why Studio Liverpool is getting the axe.
....man, I never thought I'd be a defender of corporate shill by the madness on the internet needs to stop...
It used to drive me nuts having to waste time building demos to pitch and know the people, looking at them would get fixated on some cosmetic shortcoming.
But pitching product isn't about good ideas. Good ideas are a dime a dozen, outside of filling a void in the schedule, it's about convincing the person watching you can execute on the idea, and produce something compelling.
You asked earlier if a 100 person team can only do 1 product. The answer somewhat surprisingly is, if that team has only ever built 1 product at a time, that is likely all they can do. I've seem dev houses collapse under the weight of transitioning from 1 product to 2 at a time.
In investing in independent external projects. They've also funded quite a few niche titles that haven't received significant financial returns AFAICS. The way I see it, there are two reasons why we could not be seeing innovative variety from Sony's first party studios.
1) They are incapable of designing new games that are viable products in the current market
2) Sony have different requirements of their first parties and are more reluctant to invest outside of established concepts or franchises
Option 1 you propose, which may be true, but how can you know for a certaininty, or even at a high probability, that the internal business structures at Sony aren't more like option 2 and the output we see from internal studios isn't being creatively hampered?
Quit the melodramatics. Explaining your POV when questioned by people with a different perspective is part and parcel of being on a discussion forum.
I don't view it as that complicated.
I suspect they leave their studios to their own devices. I know that is as much a fact, at least their US suits don't bother much. I know David Cage has mentioned as much as well. Short of a few studios with a proven track record, there are no favorites ( that's how you create competitiveness ) and Sony is simply looking for games to sell an imagine, to sell their console and services.
With that in mind, it just so happens there are external studios who do it better than their internal studios competing for an ever shrinking funding pool. In light of their financial troubles, the redundant ones will be getting the axe and the ones who understand the business of what is Sony's platform, is getting the booty.
I would have agreed with you on that not long ago as I thought that's how it operated, but the blog post does suggest that the internal studios don't have as much freedom to do their own thing as I believed. I guess a studio needs to have earned a lot of faith to be given carte blanche to spend Sony's money without Sony getting a say. I also wonder if there's a lot of regional difference, as the SCEE financiers are bound to be different people with different values to those running SCEJ and SCEA. A lot of positive comments I've heard about Sony this gen have been associated more with Phil Harrison. Looking at this list of Sony's 16 studios, I'm seeing a lot of one-or-two IP 'factories'. Guerilla just produce Killzone. PD just produce GT. Liverpool just produced Wipeout and Formula One. I can see three studios producing a lot of varied content - Studio Japan, Santa Monica, and Cambridge. (goes googling) Tell a lie, Santa Monica is a God of War franchise machine with support for other developers creating their broad library. Only Japan and Cambridge are producing multiple different games.
So it really does seem to me to be a case of Sony seeing their internal studios as producing staple AAA titles. GoW, GT, Infamous, Killzone, Motorstorm - whatever a studio enters into a generation with is what they typically will see it out with. That makes some sense. "You've made this great title and it's sold lots. We'd like to cash in on another iteration rather than risk a new franchise that might not be so well received." Then again, it could be the studio naturally wants to develop its ideas over the years. One obvious difference I see between Liverpool and other studios is that they stuck with the same franchises from PS2 to PS3. But then so did PD.
I'd certainly like to know who's call that was. Given that we hear Liverpool were working on a new IP for next-gen, it sounds like they were trying to make a change and had been given the go ahead, but Sony had a change of heart. Perhaps it was too ambitious and Sony don't feel able to carry devs for too long now. I'm sure Team ICO's debacle has made Sony reevaluate more critically than perhaps their internal studios have been used to.I (based on absolutely nothing) think this is more of a global WWS thing. Yoshida probably looked at how much Europe brought in vs the costs and said "Cut something!" to the WWSE boss. SCE Liverpool had high costs (look at the pound vs euro/USD) and no good output lately. Easy choice!
